The latest on the Malaysia plane

[Left Seater]

Rooster,

I am pretty sure a good 777 driver could get one down safely in 5000 feet in ideal conditions. Would need to be good braking conditions and wind on the nose, but it could be done. Getting it off the ground might be more difficult. Performance charts on the Boeing web site show it is possible at sea level with flaps 20 to get an extremely lightly loaded 777-200 airborne in just under 5000 feet with zero wind. The charts also show zero runway grade, AC off, standard pressure and temp.

So I don't know that getting it back off the ground would be possible. A dirt strip likely would have a little grade to it, not to mention uneven spots or pot holes, etc. I would also think that the dirt strip would require more power to get the jet rolling vs a paved runway.

[Left Seater]

I don't know that any non-pilot is recovering a 777 after a stall.

Remember the video of the 747 crashing leaving the Middle East a few months ago? One of the wings stalled before the other. That caused the plane to roll toward the stalled wing. To recover from that attitude is going to take work and a crap ton of sim time. You couldn't pay me enough to attempt to recover a 777 from a stall.

[Smackie Chan]

I understand the black market for aircraft parts for smaller and more common types in operation. Hell, I get it even for Mad Dogs and Guppies which have been going strong for 35 years and have operators the world over. Plenty of Asian and African operators of those types who might buy parts off the black market.

But a 777? I guess there could be a buyer or two, but I just don't see the large market for these parts.

Stealing a jet for parts seemed like a good way to make some quick cash. It's all about supply & command.

[Screw_Michigan]

Smackie Chan from WAY downtown!

[mvscal]

[Screw_Michigan]

I love the CCM bike, too.

[jiminphilly]

Lefty, your thoughts on this theory?
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/03/mh ... ical-fire/

There has been a lot of speculation about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Terrorism, hijacking, meteors. I cannot believe the analysis on CNN; it’s almost disturbing. I tend to look for a simpler explanation, and I find it with the 13,000-foot runway at Pulau Langkawi.

We know the story of MH370: A loaded Boeing 777 departs at midnight from Kuala Lampur, headed to Beijing. A hot night. A heavy aircraft. About an hour out, across the gulf toward Vietnam, the plane goes dark, meaning the transponder and secondary radar tracking go off. Two days later we hear reports that Malaysian military radar (which is a primary radar, meaning the plane is tracked by reflection rather than by transponder interrogation response) has tracked the plane on a southwesterly course back across the Malay Peninsula into the Strait of Malacca.



The left turn is the key here. Zaharie Ahmad Shah1 was a very experienced senior captain with 18,000 hours of flight time. We old pilots were drilled to know what is the closest airport of safe harbor while in cruise. Airports behind us, airports abeam us, and airports ahead of us. They’re always in our head. Always. If something happens, you don’t want to be thinking about what are you going to do–you already know what you are going to do. When I saw that left turn with a direct heading, I instinctively knew he was heading for an airport. He was taking a direct route to Palau Langkawi, a 13,000-foot airstrip with an approach over water and no obstacles. The captain did not turn back to Kuala Lampur because he knew he had 8,000-foot ridges to cross. He knew the terrain was friendlier toward Langkawi, which also was closer.

Take a look at this airport on Google Earth. ( https://www.google.com/maps/@6.3283682, ... a=!3m1!1e3)
The pilot did all the right things. He was confronted by some major event onboard that made him make an immediate turn to the closest, safest airport.
The loss of transponders and communications makes perfect sense in a fire.

When I heard this I immediately brought up Google Earth and searched for airports in proximity to the track toward the southwest.

For me, the loss of transponders and communications makes perfect sense in a fire. And there most likely was an electrical fire. In the case of a fire, the first response is to pull the main busses and restore circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one. If they pulled the busses, the plane would go silent. It probably was a serious event and the flight crew was occupied with controlling the plane and trying to fight the fire. Aviate, navigate, and lastly, communicate is the mantra in such situations.

There are two types of fires. An electrical fire might not be as fast and furious, and there may or may not be incapacitating smoke. However there is the possibility, given the timeline, that there was an overheat on one of the front landing gear tires, it blew on takeoff and started slowly burning. Yes, this happens with underinflated tires. Remember: Heavy plane, hot night, sea level, long-run takeoff. There was a well known accident in Nigeria of a DC8 that had a landing gear fire on takeoff. Once going, a tire fire would produce horrific, incapacitating smoke. Yes, pilots have access to oxygen masks, but this is a no-no with fire. Most have access to a smoke hood with a filter, but this will last only a few minutes depending on the smoke level. (I used to carry one in my flight bag, and I still carry one in my briefcase when I fly.)

What I think happened is the flight crew was overcome by smoke and the plane continued on the heading, probably on George (autopilot), until it ran out of fuel or the fire destroyed the control surfaces and it crashed. You will find it along that route–looking elsewhere is pointless.

lang-660

Ongoing speculation of a hijacking and/or murder-suicide and that there was a flight engineer on board does not sway me in favor of foul play until I am presented with evidence of foul play.

We know there was a last voice transmission that, from a pilot’s point of view, was entirely normal. “Good night” is customary on a hand-off to a new air traffic control. The “good night” also strongly indicates to me that all was OK on the flight deck. Remember, there are many ways a pilot can communicate distress. A hijack code or even transponder code off by one digit would alert ATC that something was wrong. Every good pilot knows keying an SOS over the mike always is an option. Even three short clicks would raise an alert. So I conclude that at the point of voice transmission all was perceived as well on the flight deck by the pilots.

But things could have been in the process of going wrong, unknown to the pilots.

Evidently the ACARS went inoperative some time before. Disabling the ACARS is not easy, as pointed out. This leads me to believe more in an electrical problem or an electrical fire than a manual shutdown. I suggest the pilots probably were not aware ACARS was not transmitting.

As for the reports of altitude fluctuations, given that this was not transponder-generated data but primary radar at maybe 200 miles, the azimuth readings can be affected by a lot of atmospherics and I would not have high confidence in this being totally reliable. But let’s accept for a minute that the pilot may have ascended to 45,000 feet in a last-ditch effort to quell a fire by seeking the lowest level of oxygen. That is an acceptable scenario. At 45,000 feet, it would be tough to keep this aircraft stable, as the flight envelope is very narrow and loss of control in a stall is entirely possible. The aircraft is at the top of its operational ceiling. The reported rapid rates of descent could have been generated by a stall, followed by a recovery at 25,000 feet. The pilot may even have been diving to extinguish flames.

But going to 45,000 feet in a hijack scenario doesn’t make any good sense to me.

Regarding the additional flying time: On departing Kuala Lampur, Flight 370 would have had fuel for Beijing and an alternate destination, probably Shanghai, plus 45 minutes–say, 8 hours. Maybe more. He burned 20-25 percent in the first hour with takeoff and the climb to cruise. So when the turn was made toward Langkawi, he would have had six hours or more hours worth of fuel. This correlates nicely with the Inmarsat data pings being received until fuel exhaustion.
Fire in an aircraft demands one thing: Get the machine on the ground as soon as possible.

The now known continued flight until time to fuel exhaustion only confirms to me that the crew was incapacitated and the flight continued on deep into the south Indian ocean.

There is no point speculating further until more evidence surfaces, but in the meantime it serves no purpose to malign pilots who well may have been in a struggle to save this aircraft from a fire or other serious mechanical issue. Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah was a hero struggling with an impossible situation trying to get that plane to Langkawi. There is no doubt in my mind. That’s the reason for the turn and direct route. A hijacking would not have made that deliberate left turn with a direct heading for Langkawi. It probably would have weaved around a bit until the hijackers decided where they were taking it.

Surprisingly, none of the reporters, officials, or other pilots interviewed have looked at this from the pilot’s viewpoint: If something went wrong, where would he go? Thanks to Google Earth I spotted Langkawi in about 30 seconds, zoomed in and saw how long the runway was and I just instinctively knew this pilot knew this airport. He had probably flown there many times.

Fire in an aircraft demands one thing: Get the machine on the ground as soon as possible. There are two well-remembered experiences in my memory. The AirCanada DC9 which landed, I believe, in Columbus, Ohio in the 1980s. That pilot delayed descent and bypassed several airports. He didn’t instinctively know the closest airports. He got it on the ground eventually, but lost 30-odd souls. The 1998 crash of Swissair DC-10 off Nova Scotia was another example of heroic pilots. They were 15 minutes out of Halifax but the fire overcame them and they had to ditch in the ocean. They simply ran out of time. That fire incidentally started when the aircraft was about an hour out of Kennedy. Guess what? The transponders and communications were shut off as they pulled the busses.

Get on Google Earth and type in Pulau Langkawi and then look at it in relation to the radar track heading. Two plus two equals four. For me, that is the simple explanation why it turned and headed in that direction. Smart pilot. He just didn’t have the time.

[Rooster]

The latest report I've seen would contradict this opinion of a fire in flight and that is that the turn to the southwest had already been made when the copilot signed off with ATC. His normal tone of voice and no accompanying relay of information concerning an inflight emergency suggest that the new direction was purposeful in its' intent to deceive air traffic control.

[Left Seater]

Jim,

Taken completely on its own the story you posted makes complete sense. I agree that most of us up front have a constant picture of the flight in our minds. This picture is constantly being redrawn as time passes. This also includes alternate landing fields. For the guys sitting up front in a 777 the number of available alternatives is much smaller than those available to me, so as the story indicates he likely was very familiar.

The isolation and pulling of the busses is also common and could lead to the ACARS or transponder going dark. However, those are not on the same system, so keeping them both off would be slightly out of normal.

My problem with this story is that it makes certain assumptions or uses certain things as facts, when others contradict these "facts." Did the left turn happen before or after the co-pilot acknowledges the handoff? Was the ACARS transmitting for hours after the plane went dark or was it inop first?

Way to many moving targets to really pin this thing down.

[Screw_Michigan]

You're right. Liberal bias, and all.

[Left Seater]

If these individuals were so important to Freescale, why would 20 be on the same flight? Most companies have rules on the number of executives or project team members on the same flight.

My guess is that the media here doesn't want to feed wild rumor speculation. Of course they could still let the people know they were on the plane and then leave it at that. Then again, the "leaving it at that" part would be hard for them. Prolly better to go cold turkey on it like they did.

[Moving Sale]

The more information the better I say.

[Screw_Michigan]

Looks like they may have found it.

That's a bit of a stretch, kind of like your waistband.

[Rooster]

http://nation.foxnews.com/2014/03/19/co ... d-pakistan

The upshot of this is a retired general who, presumably, has connections in the intelligence fields, is saying that the evidence is leading him to believe the plane landed safely in Pakistan. This backed up circumstantially and in a very round-about-way by the lack of aircraft parts in the search area west of Australia.

[Mikey]

This backed up circumstantially and in a very round-about-way by the lack of aircraft parts in the search area west of Australia.

LOL, this is just really funny. Or maybe pathetic.

Are you really this gullible? Maybe aliens took it, or maybe it will show up in some lost photo from 1945.



The plane crashed in the ocean and they probably will never find any "aircraft parts" unless some seat cushion floats up on a beach in Fiji in 2016.

Why is that so hard to fathom?

Flight 370: How can an airliner just vanish? Simple.

Far from a needle, an airliner is more like a single speck of dust in a haystack.


http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commenta ... z2xwMBevSu

By Peter Garrison
April 4, 2014

If you want to participate in the search for Flight 370, try this.

Bring up Google Earth on your computer and rotate the introductory globe until you are looking down at the North Atlantic. A line from New York to London should lie more or less across the middle of the Earth's disk. Zoom in until the "eye alt" — displayed in the lower right-hand corner — is about 260 miles. You are looking at roughly the size of the search area for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Now, it so happens that the North Atlantic route is one of the busiest air traffic corridors in the world, and airliners are strung out along it like beads, often just a few miles apart. There are dozens of them in the area you have picked, plainly visible silver birds against the dark ocean.

Try and find one.

You won't. The ocean is vaster than you imagine and the airplanes more minute. Far from a needle, an airliner is more like a single speck of dust in a haystack. Electronic communications have accustomed us to the idea that tiny things like cellphones are easily located in large areas, like the United States. But when the cellphone's battery dies, you can barely find it in your bedroom.
Soon Flight 370's "black boxes" will emit their last ping, and the wreckage — it's pretty certain at this point that we're talking about wreckage, not an intact 777 camouflaged with tarps or palm fronds somewhere in Kazakhstan or the Maldives — will lie enveloped in its shroud of darkness and silence. Perhaps bits of floating debris will wash ashore in future months or years — some things float forever — and they may or may not be noticed or identified as belonging to the vanished airliner.

But even if an identifiable bit of the wreckage was found today, it would not reduce the size of the search area — speculative to begin with — in any useful way. And if by a miracle the black boxes are recovered, the more interesting one — the cockpit voice recorder — won't tell us what was happening in the cockpit at the time the plane changed course because its memory holds only the preceding two hours of sound.

Despite the widespread feeling that it is incredible — "in this day and age!" — that something like an airliner full of people could go missing, it is in fact perfectly credible once you accept that some highly unusual events were required to bring it about. No matter which system you use for tracking the position of airliners — or your teenage children — there will always be some way that it can be defeated, deliberately or by accident.

The search will go on pro forma, though it was extremely unlikely at the outset that the airplane could be found, and the passage of time has pushed unlikelihood closer and closer to impossibility. Air France Flight 447, which crashed in the mid-Atlantic in 2009 and was located two years later, seems to provide a precedent for near-miraculous recoveries. But that situation was quite different: Debris was found immediately, and the search area was tiny. Difficult as the search was, it was easy compared with that for Flight 370. This time, hope persists because only at the gates of hell is it ever wholly abandoned.

How are you doing on Google Earth? Nothing yet? I'll take a needle in a haystack any day.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commenta ... z2xwLpCCh0

[poptart]

He had hidden his phone In his asscheeks.

And with his famous message, he joined millions of other internet users who post as if everything is coming straight out of their ass.

[poptart]

Are the stories of the pilot's wife and daughter moving out of his home just before the flight true?

Maybe it's just that they feared a mvscal visit.

- Vogel

[Goober McTuber]

He had hidden his phone In his asscheeks.

And with his famous message, he joined millions of other internet users who post as if everything is coming straight out of their ass.

Indeed.

[Dan Vogel]

Maybe it's just that they feared a mvscal visit.

- Vogel

He would regret ever trying to make his move. I've got this covered. And let's just say that you don't forget either about surveialence of the board and certain members who could have been known to have made threatening public threats. You'd make a mistake if you thought things couldn't still get sticky for some people. You'd do yourself a favor by not even bringing this up in the future. That's on you.